Crystal
by ProudAthena
Summary: What about if it was Jack trapped in the gate rather than Teal'c, and it took a lot more than 48 hours to get him out. AU from Season 5 ep 48 Hours. Has a little J&S UST so I've rated it a T.


Sam held the crystal in her hand for a long moment. It was roughly the length of her palm, a clear deep blue in colour and no different from hundreds of other crystals she'd handled in her time with SG1. No different and yet utterly unique.

Her CO cleared his throat, something in her expression making him feel vaguely voyeuristic. "So, Carter, is that the one?"

Startled by her sudden awareness of his presence in the doorway of her lab, Sam straightened her seat on the stool and gently placed the crystal back in the middle of the high table in front of her. "Yes, Sir."

Jack levered his shoulder off the door-frame and moved further into the room, finally stopping directly opposite her on the other side of the table. After missing him for more than three months, Sam was uneasily aware she was now so highly attuned to his presence that unless he moved away, and soon, there was a real danger she might start to resonate.

Oblivious to the effect he was having on his 2IC Jack reached for the crystal, checking for her brief nod of approval before actually picking it up. "Doesn't look like anything special."

Sam smiled to herself.

"I thought it would be, ya know … bigger." Hearing a small sound that might have been a cough, Jack fixed her with a look of complicit amusement. "I see that look and that is totally **not** what I meant so you can just get your mind out of the locker room, Carter."

Only slightly chastised and with some part of her brain asking whether she had really just shared a joke with him about the size of his … ahem … equipment, Sam decided that she'd go with silent assent rather than risk replying.

"Well, anyway, to cut a loooong story short, Carter." he tried to meet her eye again but she seemed intent upon something just behind him. He resisted the temptation to check over his shoulder. Was she blushing? "You're saying that I was in this thing for, like, three and a half months?"

Sam shifted on her stool, "Yes and no, Sir."

Jack tried not to roll his eyes. Technobabble. Here we go.

"You see when the wormhole disengaged, because the originating gate was destroyed, your 'energy signature' had already been imprinted onto this crystal in our gate but, without the event horizon of an incoming wormhole, there was no way for us to prompt our gate to re-molecularize you." She drew a deep breath, knowing there was a limit to what he'd take in the way of explanation. "Think of it as, sort of, a blue-print stored on a disk, Sir. It's not the actual house, but it tells you how to build it."

"Couldn't you have just waited until the next time someone dialled into our gate?"

"Actually, Sir, no. You see the original builders of the Stargate system built them with a number of fail-safes, some of which we don't even know about, but one of the ones we do know about is that the gate is designed to clear the memory crystals every time it's activated." Struggling for an analogy, she glanced at her lap-top. "It's like, clearing the memory on your computer. Unless it's cleaned out regularly, everything runs much more slowly."

"So, how did you finally get me out?"

Not really wanting to give him the whole story of the fiasco with the NID and Daniel negotiating with the Russians, she cut to the chase. "We tried a couple of things initially, but nothing worked and we knew that there was a good chance if we left the memory crystals in the gate that it would automatically clear the memory and then you'd be completely gone. So we removed all the memory crystals and then I just had to work out which one was you. So to speak."

She made it sound so simple but something about her demeanour was making him suspect he wasn't quite getting the full picture yet.

"How many did you have to take out, Carter?"

She mumbled a figure.

"'Scuse me?"

"Eight hundred and nineteen."

Jack was stunned. "How the hell did you ever manage to find which one was …" He held up the crystal in his hand. " … me."

"It wasn't that difficult, Sir." Sam smiled. "I worked on the assumption that empty crystals, or ones that had been 'scrubbed', would have a very regular, uniform appearance on a sub-atomic level but you'd be more … chaotic."

Sometimes it was hard to tell with Carter but he was pretty sure he'd just been insulted. He narrowed his eyes. "What exactly are you saying, Major?"

Wide, innocent, seemingly puzzled blue eyes gazed back at him. "Nothing, Sir. Why?"

"Never mind."

Sam continued with her explanation. "Once I'd identified which one I thought was you," She hurried on before he could question her any further on that particular moment of entirely personal triumph. "we contacted the Tok'ra and they were eventually able to get one of their scientists to help us out. Sorry it took so long, Sir, but they didn't really regard it as high priority."

Jack waved his hand in dismissal of her apology. "Not your fault, Carter, that's snake-heads for ya. Besides, I don't remember a thing so it didn't make any difference to me."

Jack looked back at the crystal in his hand. He'd been rolling it in his palms and flicking it end over end while they talked.

"So. What, I've just been hanging out in your lab for the last three months?"

He had to admit that the thought of spending three months in Carter's lab was not without its attractions but he was surprised to see Sam suddenly start straightening the paper work on the surface of the desk before flicking open her lap-top, all the while avoiding his eyes. Hmmm, some serious avoidance behaviour going on here, he thought to himself.

"Not exactly."

Interesting. "And what 'exactly' do you mean by that, Major?"

Sam hesitated, not sure how much of this she wanted him to know. "I mean, you were here for the first week but …"

"Go on." Placing the crystal gently back on the table directly in front of her, he folded his arms across his chest and waited patiently for her to continue. "Major."

"I took you home." The answer was so quiet he thought he'd mis-heard at first.

"Why?" The word was out before he'd really thought about it and the moment he did, he was mortified. "Sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I'm sure there was a damn good reasons why you took the crystal off-base."

Shocked by his apology, Sam was silent for a moment. "First of all, you're my Commanding Officer, and if anybody has a right to question my actions, it's you, Sir, so you don't need to apologise. Second of all, I did it for your safety." Or at least that's what she'd told herself at the time.

Jack gestured around him. "How on earth could I possibly be in any danger here?" He smirked. "Oh, apart from the obvious risk of being accidentally blown up."

Deciding she probably deserved that after the whole 'chaotic' thing earlier, Sam let it go. "Believe it or not, Sir, people used to come down here and …" She strung it out a little. If she was going to tell him this, she was going to make damn sure she got maximum mileage out of it. "I don't really know how to tell you this, Sir, but they used to come down and talk to you."

Jack's eyebrows moved north. "What?"

Tapping earnestly, and completely randomly, at her keyboard, Sam continued. "Yes. You wouldn't believe the number of people I had come through here just wanting to say 'Hello' and make sure you were okay."

Surprisingly touched, Jack looked back at the crystal. "Wow." Reaching over to retrieve it again, he held the crystal with a degree of reverence before something struck him. "Hey, talking wouldn't have put me … it … me in any danger."

"No, talking wasn't the problem." Jack watched her finger playing back and forth over the track-ball on her mouse, her attention still seemingly focussed on the screen of her laptop. "It was actually the people who wanted to play with you that were the problem. Sir."

"'Scuse me?"

"Not everyone, obviously, just a few people." Sam smiled as her mind replayed the mental image of Janet making 'Crystal Jack' retreat across her desk while shouting, in a squeaky falsetto 'Get away from me you Napoleonic needle-monger'. Jack just glared at her. She hurried on, "Anyway, I wasn't too worried about it at first but when you got stolen I decided to …"

Jack cut her off. "STOLEN? You're telling me I got STOLEN from your lab? And where exactly were you while all this was going on? And what the hell happened to security while I was away?"

"It was only Daniel, Sir." Sam bit her lip to contain her amusement. "He thought you needed a change of scene. Some guy company." She gave him a sideways look, testing his mood. "He mentioned something about 'making sure you took some downtime'. I'm not really sure what he meant by that ..."

Jack narrowed his eyes at her again, resisting the urge to remind her that it was the constant challenge of his command to get either of his two scientific minds off the base for any length of time, before his natural ebullience reasserted itself. "Really? Where'd we go?"

"He and Teal'c took you to O'Malley's. SG3 went with them." She rolled her eyes. "As 'back-up'."

"Cool. At least there was no chance of him losing me then."

"Ah, Sir …"

"You have **got** to be kidding me, Carter? He didn't actually leave me behind at O'Malley's, did he?" Waving the crystal to emphasise the depth of his disgust, he continued. "I am so going to kill his useless, cheap drunk ass." He shot a quick glance at the open door of her lab before leaning across the desk and confiding more quietly. "Don't worry, Carter, I'm a professional. No-one else ever need know and this will just be our little secret."

Sam laughed, ignoring the butterflies his closeness was setting off in her stomach. "Right, Sir, well we obviously got you back eventually so I don't think you're going to have to do anything that drastic just yet. Actually, the management at O'Malley's were great about it and it turned out one of the waitresses had picked you up. She thought you were pretty and she'd taken you home."

Jack looked back at the crystal in his hand with something approaching awe. In just three months it had been taken home by at least two women. Given that one of them was Carter too, that was more than he himself had managed in just over five years. "Respect."

"Sir?"

Dragged back to the present by that single puzzled honorific, Jack, albeit reluctantly, returned the crystal to its place on the table and cleared his throat guiltily. "Okay, I'll hold off on … neutralising … Daniel but is there anything else I should know about? Any other weirder than normal things going on while I was …" He teased her with a small smile. "… at home, Carter."

"Can't think of anything." She paused.

"Carter?"

"Ummm." She looked up at him, wondering exactly how far she could push his sudden good-will.

"Go on. I'm intrigued now, Major."

"Well, I did have to move you off the window-sill in my living room."

Jack racked his brain for any clue as to why this might be important before finally giving in. "Why?"

"Oh, nothing serious, it's just that you …" she gestured at the crystal " … started to fade, Sir."

"Started to fade, Carter?"

"Yes. Ummm, I sort of 'planted' you in a pot on the sill, Sir, but I had to take you out because you faded in the sun."

Jack was appalled. "You planted me, Carter? I'd like to think that's just a euphemism for something entirely more interesting but somehow I think not."

Choosing to ignore his little witticism, she tried again. "No, Sir, just planted. And **faded**."

An awful possibility occurred to Jack. "What?" He made a vague gesture in the direction of his own hair. "Your saying I didn't just fade, I **faded** faded."

Finally he gets it, she thought to herself. "Oh don't get me wrong, it was a really nice sort of steely grey but yes, you definitely faded, Colonel."

Jack looked back down at the crystal lying on the table between them, it's deep, uniform colour mocking his insecurities. He pointed at it. "So why's it that colour now?"

"It was the strangest thing, Sir, I swear it was grey when I put it in the Tok'ra gate but after you re-molecularized …"

There was a long moment while Sam tried not to bite her lip or give any other too obvious indication of how much she was enjoying this moment. Jack eyes didn't drop from her face and she could almost see the cogs turning behind that level gaze.

"Carter."

"Yes, Sir."

"Did I ever mention to you that I'm a professional?"


End file.
